Pages

One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Internet Shock

Before my first visit to USA, I
was introduced (First Time) to term, “Cultural Shock” and then last summer when
I went back home, I heard another term, “Reverse Cultural Shock”. I guess, before
both of these shocks, I had experienced another shock and I had no term to
describe it. Although, I was feeling the need for a term to be able to communicate
the experience but at the same time, I was thinking that, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash
of Civilizations” is explaining the phenomenon. People like Huntington had long
sensed that a “Global Village” in “Post Ideological Divide” will resurface the
historical divides and the basis of so called, “Cultural Fault lines” would be
historical boundaries of the cultural landscapes.

Parallel to physical world, now
we have a digital world and today’s World Wide Web is no more, just a place to find
information, publish information or exchange information. It has evolved into a
socializing space and people have started calling it “Second Life”. With current
growth rate, Facebook is expected to become the largest country of the world.
If there are physical cultural fault lines then it is natural to expect that
those fault lines will also find space in the digital space. Unlike the
physical cultural landscape that has its own costs for the cultural activities
that go beyond the means of lots of people; internet provides most of the
services free of cost. If walking across cultural landscapes gives initial
cultural shocks and retuning back gives initial reversal cultural shocks then
it is logical to expect having both of these phenomena on internet.

Current estimate; Facebook population is 900 million people (Though, it is an old illustration but I like it because of the multi-level comparisons)

Seeing the exchanges of debates on social
networks and on comment sections of blogs and sites, on daily basis, I am
realizing that, the divide is not just on “Cultural fault lines” but it is much
deeper. Subcultures, subgroups and even
groups that do not fall into any category, encounter each other with the zeal
of Orcs. Sometimes, these encounters are temporary on occasional events that
are just good for a no purpose chatter (The street chatters are now on the
pages of social networks).

In short, it is not just cultural
fault lines or sub-cultural variations or even within small groups’ differences
of opinions that keep the buzz of fuss going on but it is part of human nature
to buzz around things necessarily or un-necessarily. So, if the “Cultural Shock”
means to experience big cultural differences then it exist and show up with
much details on internet and this might legitimize the term, “Internet Shock”
as parallel to “Cultural Shock”.

Edward O Wilson (Some consider
him as Darwin of 20th Century) in a recent article, “Evolution and our Inner Conflicts” argues that conflicts are pre-determined by multi-level
selection. Although, I may not agree with it as a whole however, two of his
paragraphs are interesting and relevant to our topic…

……….“A second diagnostic
hereditary peculiarity of human behavior is the overpowering instinctual urge
to belong to groups in the first place. To be kept in solitude is to be kept in
pain, and put on the road to madness. A person’s membership in his group — his
tribe — is a large part of his identity. It also confers upon him to some
degree or other a sense of superiority. When psychologists selected teams at
random from a population of volunteers to compete in simple games, members of
each team soon came to think of members of other teams as less able and
trustworthy, even when the participants knew they had been selected at random.”…….

What I take from this paragraph
is that, if you come across a post, a comment, article and video that call you
or what you recognize yourself with, as “Stupid” , it might shock you or even
anger you but as it is part of human nature to see others inferior to relative
to themselves so there is no escape from it. Better to accept it and learn to
live with it. It is what Wilson is also recommending in its final paragraph,

…….”The eternal conflict is not
God’s test of humanity. It is not a machination of Satan. It is just the way
things worked out. It might be the only way in the entire universe that
human-level intelligence and social organization can evolve. We will find a way
eventually to live with our inborn turmoil, and perhaps find pleasure in
viewing it as a primary source of our creativity.”………..

If there is a partial truth in
those two paragraphs of Wilson then internet shock is a real phenomenon and it
will remain no matter even if global village shrink to global home.

I tried to keep it short but it just expanded (redundancy is another internet phenomenon :)